The Publishing Event of the Summer

TWO collections of Wilson Carey McWilliams essays! Patrick Deneen introduces them here . One is more America-oriented, the other more general.

Wendell Berry is the muse, model, and poet of Porcherism, but McWilliams is its real political philosopher. Or deserves to be.

But more importantly, if America is a nation with a future a century from now, a sign of this would be McWilliams’s name being fairly well-known and esteemed among the politically involved, because any escape from the present intellectual dead-end of the American “Left” will need to some extent to rely upon him.

Not a few conservatives could learn a lot from him as well. About the limitations of “founderism,” for one. Now, if only there were some way to get Glenn Beck’s conspiratorial mind interested in McWilliams-ism . . .